Infusing Meaning Into the Passover Seder

April 2, 2014

At the intersection of family, Jewish memory and the passions of contemporary politics and society sits the Passover seder, said to be the most celebrated annual Jewish event in the United States. But it is not always easy to make seder attendees feel the Haggadah’s mandate that in every generation, each individual should feel personally redeemed from Egypt.

The seder’s uniqueness is what makes running a successful seder so challenging, suggests Noam Zion, research fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute and co-author of two Haggadot.

It is at the same time a very intellectual venture, modeled on the Greek symposium, and a reflection of the priestly service, with ceremonial foods eaten in the proper order at the right time. Yet the leader of the seder is the head of the household, and that leader may or may not be an expert.

“You need imagination, emotion, drama,” says Zion. Ideally, you want “someone who has gone to drama school, studied in a rabbinical yeshiva, and knows the rabbinic laws and how to run a priestly seder, and you have to do that with people of all different ages and different attitudes. It’s almost a ‘mission impossible’ to balance all those elements.”

Zion says his father, Rabbi Moses Sachs, imparted two lessons about running seders: the importance of meshing traditional and contemporary, and the need for sensitivity to the audience.

Rabbi Arthur Waskow, director of the Philadelphia-based Shalom Center, which has a mission “to reunify political action and spiritual search,” remembers serious, left-wing seders with his socialist and union activist parents. Although he still participated in seders after leaving home, his central identity was as a civil rights and anti-war activist.

Then Waskow experienced a sequence of events around the seder that changed his life. In 1968, when Washington, D.C., was under virtual martial law in the wake of the riots following Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination, walking home from the office to get ready for the seder meant walking past the army, Waskow recalls.

“There was a Jeep with a machine gun pointing up my block,” he says. “My kishkes (insides), not my brain, began saying, ‘This is Pharaoh’s army; and you’re going home to do the seder.’ ”

Later that year, further disheartened by the murder of U.S. Sen. Robert Kennedy and the events surrounding the 1968 Democratic National Convention, Waskow turned again to the seder.

“I felt driven to sit down with the Haggadah given to me when I was 13, with graphics by Saul Raskin, in one hand, and in the other, King, Thoreau, Emanuel Ringelbloom (the diarist of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising), the black slave rebellions of the 1830s and ’40s, Gandhi, John Brown … ” he says. “I made them into an argument among themselves; I constructed an argument about violence and nonviolence and that became the heart of The Freedom Seder,” the Haggadah Waskow published in 1970.

For Rabbi Barbara Penzner of Temple Hillel B’nai Torah in West Roxbury, Mass., seders have changed at different stages in her life. The seders her family shared with another family were “very homey, comforting and welcoming,” with each father leading to his strength, one more traditional and her own more socially active.

After Penzner met her husband, Brian Rosman, “we wanted more discussion and less connection to the literal reading of the Haggadah,” says the graduate of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College in Wyncote.

The couple started to ask each invitee to take charge of one part of the seder.

“It was a potluck meal and a potluck seder. Because we didn’t have kids, we would be arguing well into the night.”

Things changed again when Penzner had children

“Once you have kids, you can’t argue on the same adult level, and you can’t count on them sitting at the table for a long period of time,” she says. “At each stage as our kids grew, we adapted our seder.”

According to Noam Zion, the seder ritual went astray when it “became a public reading of a sacred text.”

“The seder is supposed to be a series of oral activities: telling stories, asking questions, answering questions, having discussions, along with ritual activities.”

In fact, Zion is fine with skipping the Haggadah’s long midrash (homiletic stories meant to resolve problems in the interpretation of difficult biblical passages) that begins with “My father was an Aramean.” He claims that it is not a necessary read, but rather “a model of the kind of rabbinic discussion you yourself were supposed to have” at the seder.

From their experience running se­ders over the years, Zion, Waskow and Penzner offer a number of suggestions for molding a successful night:

• Pick the best guests you can, because you need allies who share your goal of having an interesting seder, says Zion. He notes that family members who don’t want to be there can be a big drag, while curious Christians can spice things up with new questions and put “deadbeat relatives” on their best behavior.

• Always assign roles to at least three guests before the seder. “Pick the people who are not the most knowledgeable but the most energetic, dramatic, opinionated,” says Zion. A politically interested person might talk about contemporary struggles for freedom, a storyteller might perform paper-bag dramatics, an artist might discuss artistic renditions of the four children and a good cook might bring lots of hors d’oeuvres to put out at the beginning of the seder so that there are no complaints about hunger.

• Don’t have the same person planning the seder and serving the meal, says Penzner. It’s worth paying someone to help.

• Plan the timing of the seder, Penzner says. Know when you want to end and get to the meal in time for that. If you want to include the post-meal parts of the Haggadah, you need to stop the meal early enough so that people don’t leave.

• Encourage questioning. The ritual “four questions” are just a model. For little children, suggests Penzner, hang matzot from the ceiling with crepe paper, or shape sticky Sephardic charoset into pyramids. Penzner also likes to give out chocolate chips to anyone who asks a good question.

• Make sure the seder reflects the participants: If you are bringing children to a seder that is adult-focused, Zion suggests asking the host for a 10-15 minute slot to do something meaningful for them. With small children, you may want to move the first part of the seder from the table to couches and the floor. “That gave us and families with babies room to go in and out and participate as much as they could,” says Penzner.

• Include activities that get everyone involved, like creating a second seder plate. Zion suggests one plate filled with objects brought by invitees that represent the most important thing that has shaped their Jewishness. Waskow shares the suggestion of Martha Hausman to have a “freedom plate” where “people bring some physical object from their own lives that represents freedom for them, and each person gets to lift his or her own object and explain it.”

Zion also recommends filling Elijah’s cup together — via the Ropshitzer Rebbe. As each participant pours in a little wine, they can share their hopes and dreams for “next year in Jerusalem” and for a better world.